A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke Read Free Book Online Page B

not human any more.”

    Once, when staying with her the summer before last, I found her lying on her bed with so wretched a look on her face that I didn’t dare go near her. A picture of animal misery, as in a zoo. It was a torment to see how shamelessly she had turned herself inside out; everything about her was dislocated, split, open, inflamed, a tangle of entrails. And she looked at me from far away as if I were her BROKEN HEART , as Karl Rossmann was for the humiliated stoker in Kafka’s novel. BROKEN HEART . Frightened and exasperated, I left the room.
    Only since then have I been fully aware of my mother. Before that, I kept forgetting her, at the most feeling an occasional pang when I thought about the idiocy of her life. Now she imposed herself on me, took on body and reality, and her condition was so palpable that at some moments it became a part of me.
    The people in the neighbourhood also began to see her with other eyes; as though she had been chosen to bring their own lives home to them. They still asked why and wherefore, but only on the surface; they understood her without asking.

    She became insensible, she couldn’t remember anything or recognise even the most familiar objects. More and more often, when her youngest son came home from school, he found a note on the table saying she had gone out, he should make himself some sandwiches or go next door to eat. These notes, torn from an account book, piled up in the drawer.
    She was no longer able to play the housewife. Her whole body was sore when she woke up in the morning. She dropped everything she picked up, and would gladly have followed it in its fall.
    Doors got in her way; the mould seemed to rain from the walls as she passed.
    She watched television but couldn’t follow. She moved her hands this way and that to keep from falling asleep.
    Sometimes in her walks she forgot herself. She sat at the edge of the woods, as far as possible from the houses, or beside the brook below an abandoned sawmill. Looking at the grain fields or the water didn’t take away her pain but deadened it intermittently. Her feelings dovetailed with the things she looked at; every sight was a torment; she would turn to another, and that too would torment her. But in between there were dead points, when the whirligig world left her a moment’s peace. At such moments, she was merely tired; thoughtlessly immersed in the water, she rested from the turmoil.
    Then again everything in her clashed with the world around her; panic-stricken, she struggled to keep herbalance, but the feeling was too strong and her peace was gone. She had to stand up and move on.
    She had to walk very slowly because, as she told me, the horror strangled her.
    She walked and walked until she was so tired she had to sit down again. But soon she had to stand up and go on.
    So the time passed, and often she failed to notice that it was getting dark. She was night-blind and had difficulty in finding her way home. Outside the house, she stopped and sat down on a bench, afraid to go in.
    Then, after a long while, the door opened very slowly and my mother stood there with vacant eyes, like a ghost. But in the house as well she wandered about, mistaking doors and directions. Often she had no idea how she had come to be where she was or how the time had passed. She had lost all sense of time and place.
    She lost all desire to see anyone; at the most she would sit in the tavern, among the people from the tourist buses, who were in too much of a hurry to look her in the face. She couldn’t dissemble any more; she had put all that behind her. One look at her and anyone was bound to see what was wrong.
    She was afraid of losing her mind. Quickly, for fear it would be too late, she wrote a few letters of farewell.
    Her letters were full of urgency, as if she had tried to etch herself into the paper. In that period of her life, writing had ceased to be an extraneous effort,as it is for most people in her